Man who helped craft bar code dies

Published 11:23 pm, Thursday, December 13, 2012

RALEIGH, N.C. — Norman Joseph Woodland, the co-inventor of the bar code that labels nearly every product in stores and has boosted productivity in nearly every sector of commerce worldwide, has died. He was 91.

Woodland died on Sunday in Edgewater, N.J., from the effects of Alzheimer's disease and complications of his advanced age, his daughter, Susan Woodland of New York, said Thursday.

Woodland and Bernard Silver were students at what is now called Drexel University in Philadelphia when Silver overheard a grocery-store executive asking an engineering school dean to channel students into research on how product information could be captured at checkout, Susan Woodland said.

Woodland notably had worked on the Manhattan Project, the U.S. military's atomic bomb development team. And having already earned a mechanical engineering degree, Woodland dropped out of graduate school to work on the bar code idea.

The only code Woodland knew was the Morse Code he'd learned in the Boy Scouts, his daughter said. One day, he drew Morse dots and dashes as he sat on the beach and absent-mindedly left his fingers in the sand where they traced a series of parallel lines.

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"It was a moment of inspiration. He said, 'instead of dots and dashes I can have thick and thin bars,'" Susan Woodland said.

Woodland and Silver submitted their patent in 1949 for a code patterned on concentric circles that looked like a bull's eye. The patent was issued in 1952, 60 years ago this fall. Silver died in 1963.